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I'll bite. I'm 37, a tech startup founder. I'm wary of ageism and I've long believed that not being ageist would allow us to hire smarter than competitors. How

I'll bite. I'm 37, a tech startup founder. I'm wary of ageism and I've long believed that not being ageist would allow us to hire smarter than competitors. However: - The amount of programmers grows exponentially. I've seen stats claiming it doubles every 5 years. - This means that at any time, 50% of the available workforce has <5y experience. Often this overlaps with young ages. - It also means there are simply way more programmers under 40 than over. If you randomly hire 9 programmers there's a fair chance they're all under 30. - Anecdotally, less than 5% of the job applicants we got was over 40. - Young programmers haven't had time yet to make the mistake to "repeat the same year of experience 10 years in a row". If you hire a young, junior programmer, you know they're junior - what you see is what you get. If you hire an older programmer they might be great or they might be that same junior programmer but more stubborn and with higher salary expectations. As an avid anti-ageist, in fact I'm rather disappointed about that last point. I've met many programmers at around or above my age that have gotten completely stuck into a tiny niche of experience and, even there, seem to not really have progressed much in terms of depth. Why do people let this happen to themselves? I mean I met people who spent the last 10 years developing just-not-the-same custom Magento webshop plugin over and over again, each time with a slightly different twist for a different customer. Not hiring someone like that isn't ageist, it's common sense. Once Magento is out of fashion these people have a pretty serious problem. The reason I don't understand this is because with each new technology you learn, there's a diminishing effort to learning the next because there's so many similarities to a thing you already known. There's a reason most people complaining about "javascript fatigue" are young. As an example, when React/Flux/Redux first came to the scene, old farts like me could recognize that its "unidirectional data flow" wasn't fundamentally different from the good old desktop MVC UI pattern (before Rails hijacked the name and gave it a different meaning). I imagine that this made learning React and architecting decent apps on it easier for me than for people who'd never seen data "flow" in circles before. Age definitely can be an advantage. But it isn't by definition. Keep learning new stuff folks! And if that ever stops being fun, you can always become a manager.

ticmasta 6y ago
>> with each new technology you learn, there's a diminishing effort to learning the next. You kind of answer this in your following paragraph, but there's also diminishing benefits with learning the next great tech stack. Coupled with the exploding growth in frameworks et al, it's impossible to learn them all. So I'd counter your fear of the 10x 1 year experience "veteran" with the very real scenario that you have a 10x technologies for doing the same thing. This might help someone get a job but not too many companies need this specialized, redundant skill set.
porker 6y ago
> As an avid anti-ageist, in fact I'm rather disappointed about that last point. I've met many programmers at around or above my age that have gotten completely stuck into a tiny niche of experience and, even there, seem to not really have progressed much in terms of depth. I'm the same age as you and consider this a narrow characterisation of an older programmer. I know there are better younger programmers than me. I know that I've got suck with the same experience over and over, because as I got more senior, that's what people wanted from me. I also know that the breadth of other skills I bring is significantly more than a young programmer. I've had to master how to deal with management, seen projects fail for many different reasons, mentored juniors, pulled together international teams of programmers (with varying success - motivating certain nationalities is a skill I've yet to gain), architected projects, held the peace between junior programmers who saw everything in black and white, and continued to write code that was distinctly less buggy than others. I am a programmer. One who needs to take a sabbatical and learn some new programming languages, but at heart I am someone who makes stuff happen by writing software. I like working with younger and older programmers (the oldest is in his early 60s); both keep me sharp and challenge my outlook. But if you look at my resume, sure I've gotten completely stuck and haven't progressed in terms of depth.
jnwatson 6y ago
I'll add a few points as an over-40 developer/recruiter currently working for a startup: * By 40, they've probably already done the startup thing once or thrice, and many have been there, done that. They are also less motivated by startup stock options, having seen them evaporate personally. * By 40, they are more likely part of a family unit that values financial stability. * By 40, they are at their salary cap. They are simply more expensive. They've also been around the block enough to have connections and to play the regotiating game harder. Overall, I think the strongest factor is simply the demographics you mentioned. There weren't that many folks that graduated in CS until the 2000's. Also, many of the folks that are around my age have switched careers away from development.
- H1Supreme 6y ago
  > Also, many of the folks that are around my age have switched careers away from development Or switched into it! Got my first development job at 35 after a career in graphic design.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  Where have they switched careers to and why?
cryptica 6y ago
>> The amount of programmers grows exponentially. I've seen stats claiming it doubles every 5 years. The worst part about this is that the world doesn't need so many developers. It also doesn't need so many marketers and data scientists either. The jobs are being created artificially as part of the Federal Reserve Bank's job creation mandate and financed by fiat money printing. The economy of the past decade is a complete farce. When will people wake up and realize what's going on? Soon it will take 100 developers to do the same work which used to only require 1 developer and the outcome will be worse. I think the strategy is to create a large population of developers who are incapable of creating real value outside of their extremely narrow niche... Thus making them (and the society that they are an increasingly large part of) totally dependent on corporations and allowing corporations to control and shape our politics and society and suppress our free speech. I'm a developer so it's not in my interest to say this. I wish it were not the case. Nowadays people only get into this industry for money. Nobody cares about coding.
- motoxpro 6y ago
  Wow...
- moneywoes 6y ago
  So what do you suggest to do them
  - cryptica 6y ago
    Abolish MMT. Let corporations fire all the employees that they don't need. Let employees fend for themselves and allow them to experience the system as it really is outside of the protection of corporate crony-capitalism. It's the job of the state to protect the people, not corporations. If you shelter a subset of the people, you make life much harder for all the other people who are not benefiting from that protection and have to work against it.

ticmasta 6y ago

>> with each new technology you learn, there's a diminishing effort to learning the next. You kind of answer this in your following paragraph, but there's also diminishing benefits with learning the next great tech stack. Coupled with the exploding growth in frameworks et al, it's impossible to learn them all. So I'd counter your fear of the 10x 1 year experience "veteran" with the very real scenario that you have a 10x technologies for doing the same thing. This might help someone get a job but not too many companies need this specialized, redundant skill set.

porker 6y ago

> As an avid anti-ageist, in fact I'm rather disappointed about that last point. I've met many programmers at around or above my age that have gotten completely stuck into a tiny niche of experience and, even there, seem to not really have progressed much in terms of depth. I'm the same age as you and consider this a narrow characterisation of an older programmer. I know there are better younger programmers than me. I know that I've got suck with the same experience over and over, because as I got more senior, that's what people wanted from me. I also know that the breadth of other skills I bring is significantly more than a young programmer. I've had to master how to deal with management, seen projects fail for many different reasons, mentored juniors, pulled together international teams of programmers (with varying success - motivating certain nationalities is a skill I've yet to gain), architected projects, held the peace between junior programmers who saw everything in black and white, and continued to write code that was distinctly less buggy than others. I am a programmer. One who needs to take a sabbatical and learn some new programming languages, but at heart I am someone who makes stuff happen by writing software. I like working with younger and older programmers (the oldest is in his early 60s); both keep me sharp and challenge my outlook. But if you look at my resume, sure I've gotten completely stuck and haven't progressed in terms of depth.

jnwatson 6y ago

I'll add a few points as an over-40 developer/recruiter currently working for a startup: * By 40, they've probably already done the startup thing once or thrice, and many have been there, done that. They are also less motivated by startup stock options, having seen them evaporate personally. * By 40, they are more likely part of a family unit that values financial stability. * By 40, they are at their salary cap. They are simply more expensive. They've also been around the block enough to have connections and to play the regotiating game harder. Overall, I think the strongest factor is simply the demographics you mentioned. There weren't that many folks that graduated in CS until the 2000's. Also, many of the folks that are around my age have switched careers away from development.

H1Supreme 6y ago
> Also, many of the folks that are around my age have switched careers away from development Or switched into it! Got my first development job at 35 after a career in graphic design.
moneywoes 6y ago
Where have they switched careers to and why?

cryptica 6y ago

>> The amount of programmers grows exponentially. I've seen stats claiming it doubles every 5 years. The worst part about this is that the world doesn't need so many developers. It also doesn't need so many marketers and data scientists either. The jobs are being created artificially as part of the Federal Reserve Bank's job creation mandate and financed by fiat money printing. The economy of the past decade is a complete farce. When will people wake up and realize what's going on? Soon it will take 100 developers to do the same work which used to only require 1 developer and the outcome will be worse. I think the strategy is to create a large population of developers who are incapable of creating real value outside of their extremely narrow niche... Thus making them (and the society that they are an increasingly large part of) totally dependent on corporations and allowing corporations to control and shape our politics and society and suppress our free speech. I'm a developer so it's not in my interest to say this. I wish it were not the case. Nowadays people only get into this industry for money. Nobody cares about coding.

motoxpro 6y ago
Wow...
moneywoes 6y ago
So what do you suggest to do them
- cryptica 6y ago
  Abolish MMT. Let corporations fire all the employees that they don't need. Let employees fend for themselves and allow them to experience the system as it really is outside of the protection of corporate crony-capitalism. It's the job of the state to protect the people, not corporations. If you shelter a subset of the people, you make life much harder for all the other people who are not benefiting from that protection and have to work against it.